Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

[The body of this posting vanished from WordPress on 4/23/19. Below is a summary of its content, without most of the original bells and whistles; when I finished the 4/13/19 posting, I deleted the files of background material for it, and I no longer have the heart to reconstruct it all. (By some software freak, the comments from the original posting were preserved.)

A riff on Michael Schur’s sitcom The Good Place, with Kristen Bell (as Eleanor, apparently sent wrongly to the place after her deathGood Plae modality is harsh.) and Ted Danson (as Michael, the designer of the place). Also a comment on social media (Twitter vs. Facebook). And of course on the nature of reality and our perceptions of it.

In this morning’s comics feed: a Zippy with the slogan “Kindness, Acceptance, Inclusion”; a Bizarro with a Discomfort Control mechanism; and a Rhymes With Orange about the facial recognition of a Mr. Banner. The first two can be understood at some level even if you don’t get the cultural references involved (though they’re much more entertaining if you do), but the third is probably just incomprehensible if you don’t recognize Mr. Banner.

The Palo Alto Medical Foundation periodically revises the format for its on-line statements, including after visit summaries to its physicians and labs. As far as I can tell, every such software upgrade arrives with bugs, sometimes spectacular ones; this is, after, the way of software the world over.

So it was with recent after visit summaries, in which my name at the top was given as

Dr. Zwicky M. Zwicky

I have an idea about how this might have come about. Probably not verifable, since it involves decisions by two different people, neither of whom could easily be identified.

This morning’s name: the verb pixelate. Based on the noun pixel, with at least three senses, in NOAD:

verb pixelate (also pixellate or pixilate): [with object] [a] divide (an image) into pixels, typically for display or storage in a digital format. [b] (be pixelated) (of an image on a computer screen or other display) be enlarged so far that the viewer sees the individual pixels that form the image, the enlargement having reached the point at which no further detail can be resolved. [c] display an image of (someone or something) on television as a small number of large pixels, typically in order to disguise someone’s identity.

It’s sense c that I’m especially interested in here. That, and the ambiguity of

/ˈpɪksəletəd/

between pixelated, the PST/PSP of this V, and a very different Adj pixilated.

A bit of clever cartoon humor created by Michael Babich for the Google+ community UX/UI Design (and posted on Facebook):

A play on the icons used on computer platforms for various ways of displaying information, likening the shape of the icons to the shape of kinds of food (a hamburger, döner kebab on a vertical rotisserie, a bento box, a kebab on a stick, meatballs). And exploiting the ambiguity of the noun menu — in its older sense in a food context and in a metaphorical sense in computing.

The latest affliction in my technological life: an avalanche of comments spam on this blog, thousands a day, almost all of it from the same commercial site (which I will not, of course, reveal here). Each with a perky message or query, each labeled as from a named person — the names fairly obviously created by random choice from a giant database of personal names and surnames. I only notice the names that happen to be at the top of the spam file, but they’re often entertaining. This morning’s treasure is Reyes Korzybski, obviously an eccentric but regal Pole from the rocky shores of Marin County CA.